WHAT IS BEHIND A BRAIN THAT DOES NOT READ? by Juan Tallón

I’ve been wondering for years about the brain of someone who doesn’t read. What encourages such a brain to think through time and carry on 24 hours a day, for a whole existence? How are the walls inside this brain? How does it feed itself? Once I heard Fernando Savater saying that the brain of a person that doesn’t read, or barely reads, must probably look like an “empty attic,” in which slowly and silently a thick and dying dust takes over like a complete darkness.

            There is a letter from Kafka to Max Brod in which The Metamorphosis’ author punches the subject harder and better, he says <<If the book that we are reading doesn’t shake our heads with a shove, why do we bother to read it? We need books that affect our lives as a catastrophe would do, books hurting deep and hard, like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, books that make us feel exiled in a forest far from everyone, like suicide. A book should be the axe to face the frozen sea throbbing inside ourselves.>> Kafka, like Savater many years later, thinks about a brain that doesn’t read as a cold place, inhospitable, illuminated by a dull light.

            But, what if it isn’t that way? Often times we are tempted to think that the real damaged and absented brain is precisely the one that reads. After all, I don’t know people whose brains remain very tranquil, in peace, after reading a good book. There’s something so-called “curiosity” in these brains causing continuous tribulations; these kind of people are unable to sleep well without a book at hand. People that live establishing quotidian contact with literature accumulate anxieties, vital holes, broken nights, unknown questions… Sooner or later these people are unsure about everything, holding on to doubts and constantly facing a personal ostracism that forces them to move on to another book, and this  takes place day by day. This movement becomes perpetual, and the reader remains for life defeated in front of himself, because books are, in a sense, very powerful enemies.

            In April of 2000, during his last trip to Chile, Roberto Bolaño confessed to a journalist from The Latest News that <<writers are good for nothing. Literature is useless. Literature is only useful to literature itself.>> And Bolaño concluded by saying that <<for me that is enough.>> In his theory, a person decides to become a writer <<in an instant of total insanity,>> and one good day what that person wrote ends in front of someone reading also in a gesture of total insanity. Literature, said the author of 2666 in a different interview, grows over collisions and disasters. And only in that place Literature is happy, surrounded by its own sickness, which happens to provide to some kind of people a lot of company. Nothing is more uncomfortable for people that read than the “apparent” comfort that the person that never reads conveys.

           The place of readers is one lacking comfort, the gale, the feeling of inner disorder. The popular Spanish writer Iñaki Uriarte tells in his diaries that he has a friend that reads, of the kind that read to feel sick and pessimistic, and that always arrive late to the appointments. Uriarte recalls that once he waited for his friend one hour and a half, and when he finally showed up, he justify his tardiness arguing that <<Kafka always arrived late to his appointments.>> Uriarte reproached him that he had just invented that citation, that it wasn’t true, but then his friend replied that <<Faulkner was also a great liar.>> Perhaps reading is useful to establish this kind of dialogues. Dialogues that are ephemeral but dazzling.     

Here you can find the original text in Spanish: 
 http://descartemoselrevolver.com/2015/05/09/que-hay-en-una-cabeza-que-no-lee/
translated from the original in Spanish by Francisco Laguna-Correa